Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Building a Green Economy after the Great Leap Sideways - Environment - Utne Reader

The Leap is first and foremost a cognitive jump, a shift in
perspective and priorities. There is new technology and infrastructure
involved—some of it fresh from the lab, some ancient in design—but it is
not fundamentally about the tools. Whereas technological revolutions
like the one that has reshaped telecommunications in the last twenty
years are driven by new kinds of tools—“disruptive technologies,” in the
preferred lingo of the digital world—The Leap is propelled by
disruptive techniques. New kinds of policy, new metrics, new design
parameters for vehicles and homes and whole cities, new ways of solving
problems and thinking through challenges. It is not about material
wealth or technical know-how but about creating the social and political
will to commit to making the jump.
And finally—critically—The
Leap is not just about escaping from but also moving toward, not
motivated solely by the avoidance of disaster but also, even
principally, by the desire to pursue our brightest possible future. The
track on the other side leads not just somewhere safer but somewhere
better.
The reason I can state this so baldly is because, as I
said, I’ve been there. And what follows is, in one sense, a travel guide
to the places where we arrive upon landing. I’ve seen first hand the
exhilaration the Great Leap Sideways inspires, and I can see no good
reason why anyone wouldn’t want to be where this Leap lands us. These
are not allegorical scenarios like the train ride I described but real
communities, cities, businesses, even whole nations—places that are
already thriving in the sustainable twenty-first-century world order,
all of them as real as Jeremiah Thompson’s New York and the yellowed
pages of an 1818 shipping list. The Leap does not take us to a place of
hardship or deprivation. It’s not about sacrifice, not a world
predicated on going without or getting by. Quite the opposite: it’s a
leap from a failing system to one that works, from decline and imminent
peril to a new kind of prosperity with a healthy future stretching far
out in front of it.